Since the news late last week that Coldplay were quoted by the NME as trying to achieve an album masterpiece for their fifth album, we have been digging around the internet to find out what a masterpiece is actually defined as, how it is derived and how long it takes for an album to achieve 'masterpiece status'. Maybe Coldplay have already written it, who knows. Chris Martin recently told NME that Coldplay is still hungry for a masterpiece. "We still don’t think we’ve delivered our masterpiece, so we’re still trying to do it. As long as we feel like that and we’re hungry… that’s all that matters," he said.
The blog "Death and Taxes" wrote that it’s a funny thing about masterpieces these days—they’re usually better defined as such in retrospect. Arcade Fire’s Funeral was beloved instantly, but more than anything the record heralded the arrival of a band that was sure to change the future landscape of indie rock. It wasn’t until Neon Bible and The Suburbs came out that Funeral really started getting revered as a "masterpiece," per se...
They continue: It's the same thing with Radiohead - Ok Computer rocked the music world as soon as it came out, but as I recall the excitement was at least as much about the future revolution the band was sure to unleash as it was about Ok Computer itself. And yes, there are Kid A loyalists and Amnesiac diehards out there, but when you test the waters for the last couple decades' "masterpieces," Ok Computer probably beats out almost any other record.
On the other hand, albums that are foretold and heralded as masterpieces immediately upon their release, like Green Day’s American Idiot, often end up, well…on Broadway. Not that American Idiot isn’t a great record—it is. But the reverence reserved for records like Funeral and Ok Computer — the thing that makes them real masterpieces—is probably the same thing that precludes "Ok Computer: The Musical" from coming to Broadway.
It may be true that Green Day’s new live DVD "Awesome as Fuck" will indeed be awesome as fuck. But my sense is that real masterpieces aren’t predicted or foretold, but rather earned over time, the same way you recognize your favorite movie by what you want to watch when you’re so sick you can barely think. Based on the trajectory of their recent material and what kinds of career arcs bands tend to follow, I think it’s actually quite likely that Coldplay has already written their masterpiece: 2002's A Rush Of Blood to the Head [pictured]. It’s their masterpiece the same way Siamese Dream is Smashing Pumpkins’ masterpiece. And they should be proud of it—it’s a pretty great record.
If Coldplay do, in fact, put out a new masterpiece, we’ll probably know in about 8-10 years.
Source: Death and Taxes
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